code quality
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ve probably heard about the game Katamari Damacy. The gameplay consists of little more than rolling stuff up into an ever-increasing ball of stuff. That’s literally all you do. You start by rolling up small
software development
Scott Stanfield forwarded me a link to Roger Sessions’ A Better Path to Enterprise Architecture yesterday. Even though it’s got the snake-oil word “Enterprise” in the title, the article is surprisingly good. I particularly liked the unusual analogy Roger chose to illustrate the difference between iterative and recursive approaches
software development
Raymond Chen notes that, in his personal experience, users don’t read dialogs: How do I make this error message go away? It appears every time I start the computer. RC: What does this error message say? User: It says, ‘Updates are ready to install.’ I’ve just been clicking
programming
Last year in Programmers as Human Beings, I mentioned that I was reading Programmers At Work. It’s a great collection of interviews with famous programmers circa 1986. All the interviews are worth reading, but the interview with Bill Gates has one particular answer that cuts to the bone: Does
programming
Part of Chuck Jazdzewski’s fatherly advice to new programmers is this nugget: Programming is fun. It is the joy of discovery. It is the joy of creation. It is the joy of accomplishment. It is the joy of learning. It is fun to see your handiwork displaying on the
networking
Everyone loves ping. It’s simple. It’s utilitarian. And it does exactly what the sonar inspired name implies. Ping tells you if a remote computer is responding to network requests. The ping utility was written by Mike Muuss, a senior scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Mike
multi-monitor setup
I have something in common with Bill Gates and Larry Page: Larry Page: I have a weird setup in my office. I have one computer with three monitors: one flat-screen monitor and two regular ones. I have my browser on one screen, my schedule on another and my e-mail on
software development
I’m a Windows user, and I’m out to prove Wil Shipley wrong: Mac users love their machines; Windows users put up with their machines because they don’t believe there’s anything really better. I love the Mac user base because they tend to be people who are
software development
You may think you’ve completed a software project, but you aren’t truly finished until you’ve conducted a project post mortem. Mike Gunderloy calls the postmortem an essential tool for the savvy developer: The difference between average programmers and excellent developers is not a matter of knowing the
filepaths
I recently imported some source code for a customer that exceeded the maximum path limit of 256 characters. The paths in question weren’t particularly meaningful, just pathologically* long, with redundant subfolders. To complete the migration, I renamed some of the parent folders to single character values. And, on a
software development
In Microsoft Project and the Gantt Waterfall, many commenters wondered why software projects can’t be treated like any other construction or engineering project: I am not sure why it is so difficult to estimate software development? Is it a mystery, magic, is there a man behind the curtain that
screencasting
If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a single screencast equal to a thousand word blog post? There’s a lot to be said for lightweight, embedded screencasts. I’m particularly fond of animated GIF screencasts for small demonstrations. You can see examples in these posts: one, two,